Prisoners requesting protection will be housed in single-occupancy cells, rather than communal cells, for at least 24 hours as part of new measures to be introduced in the wake of the murder of Gary Douch (21) in a communal cell in Mountjoy Prison on Tuesday.
The policy was welcomed last night by the Prison Officers Association. However, association deputy general secretary Eugene Dennehy doubted if the directive could be implemented because of overcrowding.
"There are no single cells available, so how can the prison officers carry out this instruction?" he asked.
The association had written to Minister for Justice Michael McDowell yesterday to raise its concerns.
The changes in dealing with protection prisoners followed an interim recommendation by former senior civil servant Michael Mellett, who has been appointed by Mr McDowell to conduct an independent inquiry into the murder of Gary Douch.
The Tallaght man was murdered in a protection cell in Mountjoy after he requested that he be placed there because he feared for his safety on the landing where he was being housed.
The man who killed him was also being housed in the protection cell because he had just been transferred to the prison from Cloverhill Prison but there were no beds for him elsewhere in Mountjoy.
Mr Mellett, who visited Mountjoy on Tuesday, has recommended that inmates seeking protection be accommodated in single-occupancy cells for at least 24 hours to allow staff to investigate the reasons why they fear for their safety. He says a decision should then be made about the most suitable place to accommodate the inmate.
A spokesman for the Irish Prison Service said the directive on the new policy had been sent to all prison governors by the prison service director general Brian Purcell. He said a number of single cells would be cleared and kept available for the "relatively small" number of inmates requesting protection.
Inmates already in these cells would be asked to share with other prisoners. The spokesman said there were currently 3,288 inmates in the system, 98 per cent of capacity. He added numbers in Mountjoy had fallen from 527 at the weekend to 497 last night.
News of the policy change came as the chief suspect in the Gary Douch murder was transferred from Cloverhill Prison to the Central Mental Hospital yesterday. He was transferred from Mountjoy to Cloverhill on Wednesday shortly after being released from Garda custody following his questioning about the murder.
The suspect is a 23-year-old man from Coolock, Dublin. He had spent a short period of time in the Central Mental Hospital in the last two weeks before being returned to Cloverhill, where he was awaiting trial on robbery charges.
Prison sources said the other inmates in the basement protection cell have indicated that the killer punched Mr Douch in the head a number of times some time after 5.30am on Tuesday. The inmates have said the killer then kicked the victim in the head before smearing excrement on him.
They have told gardaí the attack was short but that they were threatened by the killer for over an hour that he would attack them if they tried to raise the alarm.
One of those in the cell was an 18-year-old who has since been transferred to St Patrick's Institution. Another was serving five years for manslaughter while a third man was serving seven years for robbery. They have all said they were too frightened to intervene.
